Now that it’s a fixture on lists of the greatest Canadian rock albums of all time, it’s easy to forget that Sloan’s Twice Removed was once reviled.

Jay Ferguson, left, and Chris Murphy, of rock band Sloan in their Toronto rehearsal space.

By:Nick PatchThe Canadian Press, Published on Wed Sep 05 2012

Now that it’s a fixture on lists of the greatest Canadian rock albums of all time, it’s easy to forget that Sloan’s Twice Removed was once reviled.

Or at least it was by the behemoth of alt-rock record labels, Geffen, when the Halifax quartet delivered the glimmering LP, a thoughtful collection of brightly lit guitar-pop.

Twice Removed was an admitted left-turn from the group’s distortion-contorted debut Smeared, and at a time when the modern-rock charts were dominated by sludge-slinging Nirvana imitators, their sophomore album was not what the label wanted to hear.

The album killed the golden goose. It broke up the band. But now they’re celebrating it, in the form of a deluxe vinyl reissue and a cross-country tour during which Sloan will play the record in its entirety.

Back when Geffen first rejected it, when they asked the band to re-record the entire thing, the band certainly never imagined they would one day warm to the album.

“Self-doubt is my default setting, but I was the most torn up about it,” said bassist and co-frontman Chris Murphy in a recent interview from their cluttered Toronto rehearsal space.

“I probably would have done anything, I was so excited to be on Geffen. . . . ‘Oh, they’re asking us to record the whole thing again? I guess that’s what you do. I guess that’s what we should do.’

“I’m glad that we didn’t.”

So are the album’s legions of fans.

But they didn’t really exist back in 1994. Sure, Sloan did have fans. A couple years prior, they had inked a deal with Geffen — the home of Nirvana, Beck and Sonic Youth — on the strength of their 1992 Peppermint EP, and followed it with their messy but charming full-length Smeared later that year.

That album, of course, is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. But the band didn’t really savour the idea of playing Smeared front to back every night.

“There’d be a bunch of songs where we’d be like, ‘Ugh. Skip that one,’” laughed Murphy.

But to rich record labels eager to mine the continent’s underground for grunge gold, Smeared indicated a band with the potential to combine pop prowess (check the wit of single “Underwhelmed”) with the noisy rage that was all the rage on the charts in the grimy wake of Nirvana’s success.

So it was a natural decision for Geffen to pay for Sloan’s sophomore record up front. But for a band in the midst of an adolescent transformation, the cash seemed to just make the task ahead even more daunting.

The band demoed roughly 70 songs for Twice Removed. Then, as they do now, the band had four songwriters and all were contributing, swapping instruments as they went. Geffen thought this democratic breakdown of duties was a marketing challenge.

Well, the music was apparently more so. Sloan dug deeper into their influences — including the Velvet Underground, Slint, ’80s hardcore and, of course, some classic British pop — while penning the songs that would form Twice Removed. There was certainly a degree of defiance as they rejected the direction most of the rock world was drifting.

“We were kind of running from grunge and this sort of house of cards that it seemed to be: all that ‘poor man’s Nirvana’ (stuff),” Murphy said.

Looking back, it’s difficult to understand how such an accessible album could ever have been considered somehow radical.

“They heard it and it was like: ‘We can’t work with this,’” Ferguson said. “It seemed like to them it wasn’t of the time.”

Geffen asked Sloan to record the album again. The band refused. So the label put the record out without promotional support, essentially hiding it in plain view.

With the benefit of hindsight, Sloan feels they made the right choice refusing to remake Twice Removed.

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